Word: hizballah
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...local television station, he had a favorable rating of 3%. Given the poll's margin of error, it was possible Olmert had no support beyond his extended family. The Prime Minister responded to this dismaying turn of events--caused by Israel's less than triumphant war against Hizballah last summer, plus a gaudy array of scandals among his Cabinet ministers, plus the fact that he wasn't very popular to begin with--in a fairly straightforward fashion. "I know I'm unpopular," he told the nation mournfully in a recent speech...
...elaborate network of bunkers and fortified firing positions built over a six-year period in sealed-off valleys and hilltops throughout south Lebanon was key to Hizballah's ability to survive Israel's onslaught during last summer's month-long war. Israeli soldiers spoke of Hizballah fighters bursting out of the ground to loose off a rocket-propelled grenade before disappearing into the earth again. Israeli air crews hunted, often in vain, for the sources of Katyusha rocket fire, sometimes emanating from within a few hundred yards of the border. One bunker complex discovered and dynamited by Israeli troops...
...After the war, Hizballah had yielded security control of the area to a reinforced 12,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force, but its bunkers remained elusive. They were hidden, their entrances well camouflaged, in the dense undergrowth of remote valleys often littered with unexploded Israeli ordnance. After several unsuccessful attempts to find one, last week I received map coordinates for two bunkers in a valley near the Christian border village of Alma Shaab. With the coordinates logged into a GPS device, Ghaith and I walked carefully along a track winding through blossom-scented orange orchards at the bottom of a steep...
...heavy metal lid dragged to one side, dank musty air rose up from the entrance, the forbidding gloom of the narrow steel-lined shaft below unbroken by the bright sunlight. It had taken seven months of searching to finally discover one of the underground bunkers that had enabled Hizballah to fire thousands of rockets into northern Israel last summer even under the pounding of Israeli air and ground operations. But any sense of exhilaration at the achievement was dampened by the nagging anxiety of claustrophobia...
...where the rockets would have been stored. The second post consisted of a foot-thick reinforced concrete frame smothered with sandbags and camouflage netting and bolstered by Hesco blast protection walls. Even from a few yards up the hill, the position was all but invisible. And during the war, Hizballah gunners had tossed fire-retardant blankets over the launchers immediately after unleashing their rockets to hide the lingering heat signature from prowling Israeli aircraft...